Understanding Patent Applications and Methods for Best Approaches in Europe and the U.S.
The Background: There has been a growing trend to invalidate European patents by challenging their formal priority and using intervening prior art. The Technical Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office ("EPO") referred...more
Challenges to the validity of the “Patent Cooperation Treaty joint applicant” have been a problem for many applicants at the European Patent Office. On October 10, 2023, the EPO’s highest authority, the Enlarged Board of...more
Many people applying for a patent in the United States only consider filing in other countries as an afterthought. You should consider whether you want to file in foreign countries before filing a nonprovisional application...more
Continuing hostilities by the Russian Federation in Ukraine have garnered a number of responses from countries around the world. These include responses from patent offices, including the United States Patent and Trademark...more
Just about anywhere in the world is where one may claim a patent with an international PCT patent application. There are, after all, 154 countries bound by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). But almost no one, except...more
On Wednesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom declared that the COVID-19 outbreak "can be characterized as a pandemic," cautioning that the WHO has "rung the alarm bell loud and clear." At the time...more
In a Patent Alert e-mail distributed last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that beginning July 1, 2019, the Office would once again be accepting new International applications to the IP5 Patent Cooperation...more
Legal or not, the cannabis industry is booming. Indeed, analysts have projected that in North America alone it will grow from $9.2 billion in 2017 to $47.3 billion in 2027. Despite marijuana’s illegal status in most...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) erred in calculating a patent term adjustment (PTA) for a patent covering an oral osmotic form of an antihypertensive drug,...more
Both the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) accept a third party observation regarding validity of a patent application. In February 2012, it was announced that third party observations could be...more
A Survey of Third Party Observation Systems - Third party observations can be a cost-effective way of introducing prior art or arguments related to patentability of a published patent application. The September 2018 issue...more
Innovation and Traditional Patent Process - When you develop an innovation, its potential patentability is typically unknown, thus making it difficult to determine whether it is worth the significant expense involved if...more
For the past few years there has been fear that the law on priority claims in the European Patent Office (EPO) could result in a divisional application becoming prior art against its parent if the divisional application...more
Unitary patents in Europe - The European unitary patent and Unitary Patent Court (UPC) are slated to go into effect in early 2017. These monumental changes will have a significant impact on the ways patent rights are...more
The immediate reaction to Great Britain’s June 23, 2016 vote to leave the European Union (“EU”) (commonly referred to as “Brexit”) has been nothing short of hysterical. This paper focuses on what Brexit means for the...more
While the “Leave” result of the June 23 referendum will not have an immediate impact on intellectual property, the eventual British exit (“Brexit”) from the European Union could have long-term implications for IP protection...more
According to a recent survey of over 100 companies and universities, nearly 93% who filed patent families in 2013 filed at least some of those patent families internationally. While obtaining patent protection abroad is...more
Patents are Obtained Country by Country - All intellectual property professionals are aware that patents are issued, as a general rule, country by country. However, some inventors are under the misimpression that once...more
Public perception of the patent system has swung widely over the years from highs, such as those in the late nineteenth century when Mark Twain could write “a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a...more
U.S. exports hit a record high of $188.7 billion in December 2012. This is part of a long (albeit inconsistent) trend of growing exports, which goes back to the early 1990s and has been particularly strong and steady since...more